Elixir

Atoms can be registered globally across all nodes. This allows us to, for example, find the one generator in a set of nodes.

One globally registered atom is the group leader. All IO is done through the group leader. Exercise #4 demonstrates how the group leader can be managed.

The Erlang blog post, A few notes on message passing, describes how interprocess message passing works.

The most important takeaway for me is that messages have a defined order.

Elixir/Erlang processes are not operating system processes.

For me, the lure of Elixir is Actors.

Working through all the tooling examples.

Spent a lot of time Googling in order to complete exercise #4. Wrapping my head around piping and enumeration. Testing helps. Short snippets in LiveBook helps. Practiced documenting.

Back in college I struggled with Calculus; had a hard time grasping the concept of the day. After a semester break, I’d ace the test reviewing previous topics. Just took awhile for the concepts to settle into my brain.

I’m experiencing a similar effect with Elixir. Came back after a few days and was able to make significant progress on Chapter 13’s Formatting a Table exercise.

Things are starting to click.

Further side-quest to become comfortable with IEx/mix/dbg/pry. Learning commandline debugging since I’ve not been able to figure out how to launch a debuggable commandline program from VSCode.

Setting up a VSCode environment before tackling the Chapter 13 exercises.

A side-foray into tooling after being away for a few days.

Elixir has an unless keyword, which I don’t recall seeing in any other language I’ve used.

“Elixir exceptions are intended for things that should never happen in normal operation”

Trailing ! in a function name is an Elixir convention indicating failure raises an exception. We’ve already seeing this in the File.open! call in previous exercises.